David Dickinson - Death on the Nevskii Prospekt

There was a harsh squeak as the key turned in the lock. Shaporov put his hand on the right-hand wall and turned on a feeble light. ‘They don’t bother with refrigeration in the winter,’ he whispered, ‘they let nature work for them.’

The dead of St Petersburg were piled up in rows and rows that looked like bookcases with very wide shelves, seven or eight storeys high. Some had been placed in crude hospital shrouds by the nurses. Some, dead on arrival, Powerscourt presumed, had been left in the rags they had on as they passed away. One or two had obviously been wounded, strangely coloured gashes running down their faces. They were a terrifying collection, Powerscourt thought. If they were among the first to rise from the dead on the last day the rest of the citizens would quake in terror as these zombies from the morgue marched out from their wooden resting place. There was an unpleasant smell, of things or people going bad. Mikhail Shaporov was working his way methodically round the room, sometimes checking on the labels attached to each person. He ignored the women and the old and the very young altogether. Powerscourt heard him muttering to himself as he carried out this last inspection of these dead souls.

‘No joy here,’ he said finally. ‘It’s possible they brought him here to die but they certainly didn’t leave him in the bloody morgue.’

The second morgue could not have been more different. It was attached to a modern hospital near St Petersburg University on Vasilevsky Island opposite Senate Square and the Admiralty.

‘The only reason we’re here is that it is further away than the other place from where we think he was found, but anybody who knew the city and its facilities would see to it that he ended up here rather than that other hell-hole. This whole hospital was designed by Germans so it’s going to be very efficient. It’s funny, Lord Powerscourt, one minute we like foreigners to come in and design things for us – the whole of early St Petersburg was designed by foreigners after all – and then another decade on they’re not to be allowed in because they’re decadent, or don’t understand Russia or haven’t got any soul.’

There was no need to bribe anyone here. A grave young man took them down and waited while Mikhail Shaporov carried out his melancholy duties once more. Here the dead were not piled so high and they had their own private space, locked away inside large green compartments that looked like a giant’s filing cabinet. Name tags were pinned neatly to the handles as if they were the title of a file or a folder. Powerscourt wondered if these dead were happier here or if they might prefer the more tempestuous atmosphere of St Simon’s. The young man engaged Powerscourt in conversation in halting French. Powerscourt thought he told him that if the bodies were not claimed for burial inside a couple of months, the hospital buried them in a cemetery inland. Another terrible thought struck Powerscourt, so upsetting that he had to interrupt Mikhail and bring him over to act as translator.

‘What would happen to the dead body of a foreigner that was brought in here? Would he be kept long?’

‘Possibly, if nobody came to claim him, he could be here for a while,’ the young man said.

‘And what criteria do the doctors use in picking out the corpses they are going to use for dissecting, for teaching the medical students?’

Mikhail looked perturbed as he translated this.

‘You need not fear,’ said the young man. ‘They only use the people from the poorhouses for this. Foreigners, I think not. The students and the doctors might not trust foreign bodies.’

Even so Powerscourt could not get the thought out of his mind. Bits of Roderick Martin being cut up and examined by a crowd of students. His inner organs, his heart and his liver and his spleen, all taken out like a sixteenth-century disembowelment and prodded and poked by a lot of twenty-year-old Russians. It was a relief when Mikhail came over and shook his head.

‘He is not here.’ They thanked the grave young man and Mikhail suddenly seized Powerscourt by the arm. ‘Do you have any plans for lunch, Lord Powerscourt? You do not? Let me take you to a little place not far from here called Onegin’s. It doesn’t look very exciting but they serve the best cabbage soup in the city. Onegin’s is famous for it.’

Ten minutes later they were seated at a trestle table in what looked like an army refectory. Powerscourt half expected some Russian sergeant major to emerge from the door at the top and issue his orders to the diners. Warriors of every description lined the walls, portraits of fierce-looking little Cossacks next to imperial admirals who stared out at their fleets with haughty disdain. There were veterans of the Napoleonic Wars here, Kutuzov the seasoned general who had fought Napoleon at Borodino the only one Powerscourt recognized. On the wall above the doorway was hung a collection of ancient musketry, some of which looked older than the city itself.

‘They say, Lord Powerscourt,’ Mikhail Shaporov looked very much at home here, ordering their cabbage soup and black bread with great anticipation, ‘that when the next European war comes the army will be so short of weapons that they will impound all that old stuff above the door and cart it off to the battlefields.’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘Is there a military academy round here? Does that account for all the portraits and things?’

‘Oddly enough,’ said Mikhail as two enormous bowls of cabbage soup were put in front of them, ‘it’s the university students who frequent this place. The prices are low, the food is plentiful – if it’s enough for a peasant’s main meal of the day it’s enough for a philosophy student’s lunch. I should leave that soup to cool down for a moment, if I were you. They send it out hot enough to burn your tongue off.’

‘You were not tempted, Mikhail, to be a student here, in your own native city?’ said Powerscourt blowing desultorily at his bowl.

‘My father was very keen that I should go to Oxford, I don’t know why,’ the young man replied, ‘but my elder brother was here. I can’t tell you how different it is being a student in England and Oxford, Lord Powerscourt.’

‘Really?’ said Powerscourt, trying the first exploratory mouthful of his soup.

‘It’s much more serious here,’ Mikhail Shaporov replied, stirring his soup slowly with his spoon. ‘It’s nearly an occupation in itself. In Oxford the height of fame and fashion is probably to climb to the top of Magdalen Tower or the Sheldonian or drink your college cellars dry. Here the height of fame and fashion would be to blow up a government minister or start a revolution. I don’t think undergraduates in England ever take philosophy seriously. Here you find people whose student lives are consumed by it. Some of them become so wrapped up in it that they turn into perpetual students, staying on at the university in their quest for the answer to everything until they are in their thirties.’

Powerscourt was now seriously engrossed in his soup. It was thick, far thicker than any vegetable soup he had ever eaten in London. He thought he detected carrot and potato and garlic and maybe tomato and maybe lemon juice and possibly sour cream, as well as the eponymous cabbage. It was remarkably filling, giving the impression that the consumer was not in a barrack-style restaurant near the university but out in the great expanse of the Russian countryside, flat fields reaching to the distant horizon, an occasional tree providing a modicum of shade, a lone peasant pulling a handcart along a dusty road, a sense of space stretching out till eternity, cabbage soup that tasted of the earth of Mother Russia herself.

‘People always think,’ said Mikhail Shaporov, ‘that they must have a battalion of grannies in the kitchen here, imported from the nearby countryside perhaps, who have inherited this recipe from their grannies and so on, a direct line of grannyhood going back to the foundation of the city itself, hunched over their ancient saucepans, chopping and tasting and stirring and checking their soup all day long.’